into
the burn all the stock of kail.

"There, you old rebel witch," said he, with a heartless laugh, as the
party set forward again, "you may live on God's blessing now."

It broke the poor toil-worn widow's heart, and she died ere the summer
was ended. Lost to the ken of his few friends, her boy wandered
sorrowfully to another part of the country, and winter storms soon left
but the crumbling walls and broken roof of what had been his home.

Thirteen years, almost to a day, passed ere fate brought together again
the man who committed that foul wrong and his surviving victim. If
retribution came with halting foot, it came none the less surely, for
"though the mills of God grind slowly, they grind exceeding small."

HIGHWAYMEN IN THE BORDER

It can scarcely be said that the Border, either north or south of Tweed,
has ever as a field of operations been favoured by highwaymen. Fat
purses were few in those parts, and if he attempted to rob a farmer
homeward bound from fair or tryst--one who, perhaps, like Dandie Dinmont
on such an occasion, temporarily carried rather more sail than he had
ballast for--a knight of the road would have been quite as likely to
take a broken head as a full purse.

There has occasionally been some disposition to claim as a north country
asset, Nevison, the notorious highwayman, who is said to have been the
true hero of the celebrated ride to York, which, in his novel,
_Rookwood_, Mr. Harrison Ainsworth assigns to Dick Turpin. Nevison,
however, was a north countryman only in the sense that he was born in
Yorkshire, and he never did frequent any part of the north country, but
confined his operations chiefly to districts adjacent to London, where
he flew at higher game than in those days was generally to be found
travelling Border roads. Nor in reality was it he who took that great
ride to York. The feat was accomplished in the year 1676 by a man named
Nicks, if Defoe's account is to be relied on. Nicks committed a robbery
at Gadshill, near Chatham, at about four o'clock one summer's morning.
Knowing that, in spite of his crape mask, his victim had recognised him,
Nicks galloped to Gravesend, where, together with his mare, he crossed
the Thames by boat, then swung smartly across country to Chelmsford, and
thence on, with only necessary halts to bait his horse, by way of
Cambridge, through Huntingdon, and so on to the Great North Road.
Without ever changing his mount, he reached York ea